asian american studies in age of prison industrial complex

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Asian-American Studies in the Ageof the Prison Industrial Complex:

Departures and Re-narrationsDylan Rodrı´guez

INTRODUCTION: THE CARCERAL DILEMMA OF ASIANAMERICAN STUDIES

This essay offers a schematic reflection on the institutional forma-tion and political location of Asian-American Studies in relation

to the rise of the United States prison industrial complex1 overthe last three decades. I am generally concerned with the peculiarlocation of ‘‘Asian Americans’’ as fabricated cultural figures withina U.S. social and racial formation2 that is increasingly constituted byvarious discursive and institutional technologies of criminalizationand punishment. More specifically, I am interested in a criticalassessment of the problematics—that is, the schematic sets of assumptions that frame and discipline processes of critical inquiryand intellectual formulation—through which Asian-American

Studies has come to (re)narrate and cohere itself in the context of a post–civil rights, and allegedly ‘‘multicultural,’’ civil society.

The post–1965 migrations of professional, petit bourgeois, work-ing class, undocumented, and refugee Asian populations to the Uni-ted States has facilitated the emergence of a field of discretely‘‘Asian American’’ civil productions which encompass everythingfrom academic initiatives and programs, community-based non-profit and social service organizations, legal advocacy groups, alter-native subcultures, student movements, and other similar social

constructions of ‘‘panethnic’’3

Asian-American political and culturalinterest. Amidst the proliferation of this putative Asian-American

The Review of Education, Pedagogy,

and Cultural Studies, 27:241–263, 2005

Copyright # Taylor & Francis Inc.

ISSN: 1071-4413 print=1556-3022 online

DOI: 10.1080/10714410500228918



order that has innovated and drastically expanded varieties of

human unfreedom and punishment. This carceral=punitive nationalformation, which is currently enacting new and global forms of state-proctored, mass-based imprisonment,4 is inseparable from a broader genealogy of mass-based civil5 and social death6 traceableto the lasting legacies of racial chattel slavery and its variable articu-lations with the historical architecture of the U.S. prison. Thus,amidst a mass incarceration that is arguably without historical pre-cedent (around 2.5 million held captive as of this writing, more thanhalf of whom are Black),7 it is worth examining whether and how

Asian American Studies and its correspondent Asian Americanismsare structurally entangled with, and actively complicit in, the gen-esis and expansion of this carceral social liquidation. The followingpages compose an initial (and admittedly concise and schematic)attempt at a counter-narration of the relationship between threecontemporaneous—and in my view, overlapping and mutuallyconstitutive—institutional formations: Asian-American Studies,Asian-American civil society, and the U.S. prison industrial complex.

I close these introductory comments with an open-ended ques-

tion: How might the field of Asian American Studies—and its pro-fessed alignment as a critical intellectual=pedagogical practice—betransformed, distorted, or unhinged if it were compelled to articu-late a direct discursive and political relation to contemporary tech-nologies of racial pathologization, criminalization, bodilyimmobilization, and imprisonment?

WHITE RECONSTRUCTION: ‘‘LAW AND ORDER’’ ASHISTORICAL CONTEXT

Perhaps the pivotal enunciative moment for the rise of the contem-porary U.S. policing and imprisonment regimes was the culturalwatershed of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign. Thismobilization, while failing in its bid to win Goldwater the executiveoffice, was wildly successful in generating a re-coded racial dis-course of policing and criminality that targeted the Black and

Brown8

urban poor and working classes for political neutralization,if not strategic social liquidation. Articulated at the historical pin-nacle of the reformist civil rights movement and in the face of accel

242 D. Rodrı guez



Rican, Chicano, Asian, and domestic Third Worldist liberation

struggles, Goldwater’s rhetoric resonated with the anxieties of awhite civil society whose hegemony appeared to be in a state of epochal crisis. ‘‘Law and order’’ was thus simultaneously a culturalproduction and political agenda, offering a white national com-munity the promise of militarized rescue as well as a sweepingstructure of collective sentimentality.

Goldwater’s 1964 acceptance of the Republican presidentialnomination contrived an intersection of ‘‘racial’’ and ‘‘criminal’’discourse, pitched to a white electorate ostensibly reeling from

the civic disruptions of Black and Brown urban rebellions. Render-ing a vision of white civil society bound by a rearticulated reaction-ary nationalist solidarity, Goldwater in fact reawakened the dreamof a militarized white supremacist state amidst a crumbling Amer-ican apartheid. His political fantasy, which amounted to a vision of post-civil rights White Reconstruction, was the harbinger of aquickly cementing common sense:

Now, my fellow Americans, the tide has been running against freedom.Our people have followed false prophets. We must, and we shall, returnto proven ways—not because they are old, but because they are true

. . ..

And this party, with its every action, every word, every breath, and everyheartbeat, has but a single resolve, and that is freedom. . . freedom—balancedso that liberty lacking order will not become the license of the mob and of the jungle.9 [emphasis added]

Echoing the racial juxtapositions of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Dark-ness, Goldwater elaborated a white populist conception of libertyand security defined through the militarized containment and

repression of the lurking urban=mob= jungle threat. His declarationof veritable domestic warfare in this nomination speech prefacedRichard Nixon’s watershed electoral victory in 1968 and establisheda crucial discursive political schema for a reconfigured police-prison hegemony. Foreshadowing what would soon becomeNixon’s political mantra, Goldwater elaborates,

Security from domestic violence, no less than from foreign aggression, isthe most elementary and fundamental purpose of any government, and

a government that cannot fulfill that purpose is one that cannot longcommand the loyalty of its citizens. History shows us—demonstrates that

thi thi th f t th th f il f

Asian-American Studies in the Prison Industrial Complex 243



The exponential growth of the police industry in the United States

closely followed the dictates of the Goldwater-Nixon law and order bloc, carried on the strength of a putative political mandate to reor-ganize, remilitarize, and refocus on the restoration of a whitenational hegemony in crisis.11 An allegory of bodily confrontation between innocent white vulnerability—a construct that crystallizednotions of white communal and bodily security across geographiesand classes—and Black=Brown criminal physicality instantiated a binding historical telos for the post-1960s White Reconstruction, apost-civil rights revival that required the simultaneous and decisive

disruption of U.S. based anti-racist and anti-imperialist liberationmovements and their counterpart urban insurrections.Law and order’s discursive structure was, in an important sense,

a political articulation of white liberation, articulated through whitecivil society’s awakening to the possibility of its own discursive-material disarticulation: the militant reformism of the Civil RightsMovement had not only broken the legal structures of segregationand Jim Crow, but had additionally foreshadowed a lapse andspasm within the white supremacist state and body politic. The

emergence of this definitive era of domestic and international liber-ation movements throughout the 1960s and 1970s encompassedpolitical and juridical assertions that directly antagonized the broadly conceived premises of the nation’s historical formation,while substantively challenging and destabilizing the post-emanci-pation juridical and social structures of American white supremacy,including formalized segregation, wanton racist police violence,lynching, and illegal land occupation. Such notions as ‘‘Black liber-ation’’ and ‘‘Indian sovereignty,’’ in particular, represented

unanswerable demands on the presumptive white body politic,precisely because both were phrased as domestic claims on theUnited States of America, putatively blaspheming the sanctity of historically white localities. Additionally, the racialized ‘‘class’’ dis-placements of rapid de-industrialization in urban and rural centersof production offered fodder for white civil society’s closing of ranks—that is, white supremacist capital’s production of Blackand Brown underground workers (including undocumentedpeople and those in extralegal occupations) and non-workers repre-

sented, to the Goldwater-Nixon bloc, the very picture of a riot wait-ing to happen.Articulated through and against the progressive and radical

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American social formation and abolition of white supremacist

socio-cultural structures, the White Reconstruction reasserted anessential stewardship of the state through the versatile mechanismof racial criminalization. The emergent technology of crime pro-duction was spurred by Nixon’s rise to national power and the sub-sequent, massive federal and local investment in militarized policeforces.12 In this context, Goldwater’s ominous forecast of tyranny’sonset shot through a civic consciousness that was absorbing thepossibility of white freedom’s rollback, and while white self-defense formed the template for an aggressively militarizing state,

the law-and-order message remained intensely grandiose and global. Goldwater was, in an important sense, foreshadowing U.S.white civil society’s globalization, envisioning a reconstruction thatreached across the domestic sphere and constituted a hegemonicwhite Atlantic:

I believe that we must look beyond the defense of freedom today to itsextension tomorrow . . . . I can see and I suggest that all thoughtful menmust contemplate the flowering of an Atlantic civilization, the whole world

of Europe unified and free, trading openly across its borders, communicat-ing openly across the world. This is a goal far, far more meaningful than amoon shot.

. . . I can also see—and all free men must thrill to—the events of thisAtlantic civilization joined by its great ocean highway to the United States.What a destiny, what a destiny can be ours to stand as a great central pillarlinking Europe, the Americans and the venerable and vital peoples and cul-tures of the Pacific. I can see a day when all the Americas, North and South,will be linked in a mighty system, a system in which the errors and misun-derstandings of the past will be submerged one by one in a rising tide of

prosperity and interdependence. . .

. But we pledge—we pledge that humansympathy—what our neighbors to the South call that attitude of ‘‘simpa-tico‘‘—no less than enlightened self-interest will be our guide.13

Couched in the rhetoric of civic security and personal safety, thisdiscourse offered white civil society political rescue and a newstructure of collective sentimentality, mobilized through a intersec-tional rearticulation of classical American conceptions of both‘‘race’’ and ‘‘crime.’’

The convocation of the Nixon administration in 1968 involved awildly successful extrapolation and institutionalization of the semi-nal Goldwaterist rhetoric A newly authenticated and electorally




the policing, criminal justice, and imprisonment apparatuses by

integrating the transparently racist codings of law and order intotheir collective—and always overlapping—modus operandi. In sub-sequent years, this process has even fabricated a novel schooling=penal nexus, wherein a veritable war on young people of colorhas emerged, according to Giroux, as ‘‘an attempt to contain, ware-house, control, and even eliminate all those groups and social for-mations that the market finds expendable.’’14 (I will discuss thisnexus in more detail below.)

Law and order’s production of a racially pathologized criminality

has, in this way, provided the juridical torque necessary for newmilitary and carceral organizations, technologies, and territories.Militarized policing, criminal justice, and mass-scale imprisonmenthave emerged since 1964 as socially productive technologies, forgingan indelible linkage between the site and scene of the prison, thestructured impunity of newly expanded and empowered policeforces, and the corresponding world of a consolidated and coher-ent—though always endangered—normative white civil society. Itis within this context that Asian Americans qua ‘‘model minorities’’

have become pivotal social and cultural figures=fabrications,positioned at the intersection of multiple racial antagonisms andsituated within a specific projection of white political desire.

CULTURES OF POVERTY AND MODEL MINORITIES: OUTLINESAND CONTESTATIONS OF A WHITE–ASIAN ALLIANCE

The popular absorption of law and order’s situated, and eloquently

articulated reactionary populism was lubricated by the circulationof the liberal racist discourses inscribed by the infamous 1965Moynihan Report (The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,compiled for the U.S. Department of Labor) and Oscar Lewis’ascendant ‘‘Culture of Poverty’’ thesis, widely disseminatedin 1966 through his celebrated ethnographic study La Vida: A PuertoRican Family in the Culture of Poverty, San Juan and New York,as well as a short article published in the popular journal Scientific American. This discursive political intersection—between Goldwa-

terist reactionaries and the liberal professional intellectual estab-lishment—is worth exploring further for its seminal contributionto the historical architecture within which contemporary Asian

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The conjoined rhetoric of the Moynihan-Lewis intellectual bloc

was famously couched as an alleged social science of embeddedBlack=‘‘Negro’’ (for Moynihan) and Mexican=Puerto Rican (forLewis) cultural pathology, and suggested the essentialized site of ‘‘family structure’’ as the source of a self-perpetuating defeatism.Moynihan’s introduction pronounced, ‘‘The fundamental problem . . .

is that of family structure. The evidence—not final, but powerfullypersuasive—is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling.’’ The future U.S. Senator’s notorious ruminations on the Blackfamily’s ‘‘Tangle of Pathology’’ (see Chapter IV of The Negro Family)

helped shape a white civic consciousness that sought explanationfor the persistent antagonism—and lurking crisis—that poor urbanBlack communities embodied within the white racial imaginary of American civil society.

In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal struc-ture which, because it is so out of line with the rest of the American society,seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes acrushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great manyNegro women as well.15

Lewis similarly offered,

The culture of poverty. . . is not only an adaptation to a set of objective con-ditions of the larger society. Once it comes into existence it tends to per-petuate itself from generation to generation because of its effect on thechildren. By the time slum children are age six or seven they have usuallyabsorbed the basic values and attitudes of their subculture and are notpsychologically geared to take full advantage of changing conditions orincreased opportunities which may occur in their lifetime.16

Lewis’ extended ruminations on ‘‘matrifocality’’ as a centralelement of various cultures of poverty echoed Moynihan’s conten-tions while supplementing them with a more definitive set of con-clusions. It appeared, for Lewis, that poor urban Puerto Ricanswere an extrusive presence in white civil society, a population thatin his terms approximated a culturalist conception of racial pathol-ogy and incipient subhumanity:

[O]n the whole it seems to me that [the culture of poverty] is a relatively thinculture. There is a great deal of pathos, suffering, and emptiness amongth h li i th lt f t It d t id h t




magnify helplessness and isolation. Indeed, the poverty of culture is one of the

crucial aspects of the culture of poverty.

17

[emphasis added]

Crucial to the production of the academic and popular consensusaround the culture of poverty was that it was embroidered ontothe racial formation of the post–1960s White Reconstruction.Specifically, Moynihan and Lewis (and their ideological contem-poraries in academia, policy think tanks, and government) helpedsuture a white liberal common sense that apprehended the persist-ence of Black=Brown poverty, disfranchisement, and structured

vulnerability to premature death

18

as the inevitable (though tragic)production of self-defeating cultural values and a ‘‘retarding’’matriarchal family structure. Lewis’ schematization of a povertyof culture pervasive among the Black=Brown poor19 in this sensehinted at something more ominous: to the extent that ‘‘culture’’ iscommonly understood as the primary and constituent labor of human beings across varying scales of community and social inter-course, Lewis implied that there were people in the United Statesthat were simply ill-equipped to either contribute or survive the rig-

ors of the postwar—and embryonic Cold War—national telos.Enriching and broadening the scope of this reconstituted racialcommon sense was the conspicuous proposition of an Asian immi-grant ‘‘model minority,’’ an image that obtained wide circulationwith the paradigmatic U.S. News and World Report article of 1966.

At a time when Americans are awash in worry over the plight of racialminorities—One such minority, the nation’s 300,000 Chinese-Americans,is winning wealth and respect by dint of its own hard work.

In any Chinatown from San Francisco to New York, you discover

youngsters at grips with their studies. . .

.Still being taught in Chinatown is the old idea that people should

depend on their own efforts—not a welfare check—in order to reachAmerica’s ‘‘promised land.’’

Visit ‘‘Chinatown U.S.A.’’ and you find an important racial minoritypulling itself up from hardship and discrimination to become a model of self-respect and achievement in today’s America.20

Numerous Asian American Studies scholars and activists have

examined the genesis of the contemporary model minority racialimaginary as the (perhaps required) discursive complement to thesustained post civil rights era subordination of Black and Brown

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extent that Blacks constitute, in DuBois’ famous formulation, a

categorical ‘‘problem’’ for the racial formation of the UnitedStates, Asians (for Prashad, South Asians in particular) embody a‘‘solution.’’ Prashad writes,

Many folks feel, it seems, that to make positive statements about what theyconsider to be a race is just fine. . .. These are not only statements of admir-ation. Apart from being condescending, such gestures remind me that I amto be the perpetual solution to what is seen as the crisis of black America.I am to be a weapon in the war against black America.21

Robert S. Chang, staking a claim for a ‘‘narrative space’’ that moves beyond a ‘‘black-white racial paradigm,’’ additionally argues thatmodel minorityism has obscured the oppression of Asian Ameri-cans.

This history of discrimination and violence, as well as the contemporaryproblems of Asian Americans, are obscured by the portrayal of AsianAmericans as a ‘‘model minority.’’ Asian Americans are portrayed as‘‘hardworking, intelligent, and successful.’’ This description represents a

sharp break from past stereotypes of Asians as ‘‘sneaky, obsequious, orinscrutable.‘‘22

Further positing the ‘‘dual harm’’ sustained by the model minorityrendition, Chang continues,

In addition to hurting Asian Americans, the model minority myth works adual harm by hurting other racial minorities and poor whites who are blamed for not being successful like Asian Americans. ‘‘African-Americansand Latinos and poor whites are told, ‘look at those Asians—anyone canmake it in this country if they really try.’’’ This blame is justified by themeritocratic thesis supposedly proven by the example of Asian Americans.This blame is then used to campaign against government social services forthese ‘‘undeserving’’ minorities and poor whites and against affirmativeaction. To the extent that Asian Americans accept the model minority myth,we are complicitous in the oppression of other racial minorities and poorwhites.23

Notably, critics like Chang fail to elaborate how the production of ‘‘model minority’’ discourse has informed and constituted an over-

lapping police-corrections agenda that funnels pre-legitimated stateviolence (from preemptive police detention to street assassinationsqua ‘‘justifiable homicide’’) through the sieve of contemporary




relative exception) tend not to be the categorical racial targets of the

militarized law and order state’s most acute exercises of bodilyviolence and juridical punishment.

To contest and revise Chang’s summation, far more is at stakethan differential access to ‘‘government social services’’ and (anow non-existent) ‘‘affirmative action.’’ While there is truth to Pra-shad’s and Chang’s assertions that the model minority imaginaryamounts to a cynical, white supremacist objectification of Asiansas a political and cultural ‘‘weapon’’ against other ‘‘racial minori-ties,’’ (though I am less inclined than Chang to contend that it is

either similarly or significantly utilized against ‘‘poor whites’’)what remains undertheorized in Asian American critique is the his-torical linkage between model minorityism and the militarized cul-tural production of the ‘‘law and order’’ state. Such a theoreticalexamination requires a particular focus on the political and culturaltechnology of criminalization—defined here as the social and polit-ical apparatuses through which (racial) categories of devianceand criminality are invented, refined, and formalized into thestate’s mobilizations of policing and jurisprudence.

By way of example: the contemporary technology of criminaliza-tion has reached across the emergence of the Asian Americanmodel minority figure in the genesis of a veritable war on youngpeople of color, waged on the street and in the increasingly militar-ized sites of urban public schools. Structurally and discursivelylinked to what scholar-activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls the riseof ‘‘domestic militarization,‘‘24 the school is becoming a site of stra-tegic penal management and social neutralization, and projects theracist ‘‘law and order’’ imperative into an age-based preemptive

strike: ‘‘One way or another, if you’re young, poor, and of color,cops will find a way into your classroom.’’25 Cultural theorist andcritical pedagogue Henry Giroux, in an elaboration of Gilmore’sschematic, has suggested that the rise to prominence of school- based ‘‘zero tolerance laws’’ ought to be read as a material and juridical metaphor for ‘‘hollowing out the state and expandingthe forces of domestic militarization,‘‘26 further arguing that thepopular cultural and ideological effect of these laws is to mobilize‘‘racialized codes and race-based moral panics that portray black

and brown urban youth as a new and frighteningly violentthreat.’’27 Here, the technology of criminalization becomes the pointof transfer for an institutional transformation: schools simul

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racially pathologized youth) and disciplinary youth interpellation.

According to Giroux,

While schools share some proximity to prisons in that they are both aboutdisciplining the body. . . little has been written about how zero tolerancepolicies in schools resonate powerfully with prison practices that signifya shift away from treating the body as a social investment (i.e., rehabili-tation) to viewing it as a threat to security, demanding control, surveillance,and punishment. . .. [S]uch practices have exceeded the boundaries of theprison-industrial complex, providing models and perpetuating a shift inthe very nature of educational leadership and pedagogy.28

The cultural production and statecraft of the Asian-Americanmodel minority, reproduced and institutionally inscribed by theadministrative culture of dominant schooling institutions (andaccentuated in higher education), is wedged in a peculiar symbiosiswith this militarization and penal pedagogical shift in the war onpoor urban Black and Brown youth. The Asian-American modelminority, as a cultural fabrication situated within a particular his-torical conjuncture, is something even more than (as Prashad

correctly asserts) a ‘‘weapon in the war against black America’’: it is both the condition of possibility and embodied site of reproduction of thisdomestic war, a seminal move in the production of a national(ist)‘‘multiculturalism’’ that fortifies and extrapolates historical whitesupremacist social formations—including and especially the burgeoning U.S. prison regime. As such, the Asian-Americanistcontestation of the ‘‘model minority myth’’ as inaccurate, deceptive,(anti-Asian) racist, and=or an erasure of the material subordinationof poor and disenfranchised Asian populations tends to elide criti-

cal confrontation with the militarized and hegemonic discursive andsocial structure through which the myth itself has been articulated.Thus, against both the patronizing liberal racist valorizations and

Asian Americanist contestations of the Asian model minority’salleged scholastic, economic, and cultural achievement sits a dur-able (though dynamic) contextual backdrop of state and state-sanc-tioned racial violence. The preliminary genealogy of post-1970stechnologies of criminalization that I am briefly outlining here sug-gests that the lever through which Asian-American decriminalization

obtains its social truth—vis-a-vis a self-fulfilling white socialimaginary that claims to witness, and subsequently proclaims thecreeping ascendance of studious law abiding Asian minorities




white civil society against its more ominous Black=Brown racial

antagonists and cultural pathogens.The rendition of the Asian immigrant model minority both facil-

itates and constitutes the expansion of state capacities in the trajec-tory of mass-based Black=Brown punishment, providing theschema for an ascendant—though insistently multicultural—white-Asian alliance that manifests conspicuously in such instancesas the 1980s and 1990s neoconservative movement to end affirm-ative action policies (in which Asian Americans were continuouslysolicited and foregrounded as allies of a white supremacist

pro-‘‘meritocracy’’ argument)29

and the post-1992 rapprochement between the stubbornly brutal Los Angeles Police Departmentand prominent Korean=Asian-American community leaders. Thelatter example provides an opportune moment of inquiry, if only because current Asian Americanist formations (including AsianAmerican Studies) have largely undertheorized—if not altogetherignored—the implications of such a political coalescence.

Emblematic of this reactionary Korean American–LAPDcoalition was a 2002 event entitled ‘‘The March Against Crime,’’

which occurred in the shadow of a massive and nationally publi-cized investigation of LAPD’s Ramparts Division, a scandal thatrevealed widespread corruption, brutality, and false testimony byLAPD officers resulting in up to 3000 wrongful convictions, anoverwhelming number of which were Black, Chicana=o,Mexicana=o, and Latina=o.30 In the midst of these public revelationsof the Ramparts Division as the instantiation of a low-intensity,localized urban state terrorist campaign against Black=Brown com-munities in Los Angeles, the Korean Youth & Community Center

(KYCC) and the Los Angeles Police Department (Wilshire Division)widely circulated a flyer and email which announced, in resonancewith Goldwater’s rhetorical precedent: ‘‘10 YEARS AFTER THEL.A. RIOTS Our City comes together to CLEAN our Streets.’’ Theflyer=email additionally urged its readers to ‘‘speak out AGAINSTCRIME and GRAFFITI; and show our STRENGTH as a Com-munity.’’ Contextualized by the heightened antagonism provoked by the Ramparts scandal, as well as the LAPD’s infamous recordof militarized—and often spectacular—violence against racially-

profiled people and communities, this presumptive invoking of ‘‘our Community’’ extrapolates the limits of the Goldwaterist racialparadigm In fact this Korean American call for a police powered

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civil alliance cut on the teeth of the state’s mobilization against its

non-Korean=Asian, racially pathologized Others.Chang, writing in the immediate aftermath of the 1992 Los

Angeles insurrection, inscribes the context for this emergentwhite-Asian alliance in his mystification of a Korean Americanpositionality ‘‘between’’ racist whites and ‘‘angry’’ Blacks:

This resentment, fueled by poor economic conditions, can flare into angerand violence. Asian Americans, the ‘‘model minority,’’ serve as convenientscapegoats, as Korean Americans in Los Angeles discovered during the1992 riots. Many Korean Americans ‘‘now view themselves as ‘human

shields’ in a complicated racial hierarchy,’’ caught between ‘‘the racismof the white majority and the anger of the black minority.‘‘31

Obscuring the material entitlement which Korean American small business owners represent in relation to poor, disfranchised, non-propertied Black=Brown populations in Los Angeles—most impor-tantly, property ownership and the presumptive right to police pro-tection that it elicits—Chang’s formulation ironically amplifies afundamental tenet of model minority discourse while reifying the

white supremacist imaginary of urban disorder: In this narration,we are to envision the innocent, naıve, hard working and law-abiding Asian immigrant entrepreneur as the misdirected andunfortunate target of opportunistic Black=Brown aggression againstwhite racism and the police enforced sanctity of private property.Chang’s cynical conception of an ‘‘angry’’ Black mob engulfmentof Korean Americans (to wit, the lone Korean American fatalityduring the L.A. rebellion was the collateral victim of a bullet fired by a Korean American shopkeeper, ostensibly intended for a face-

less rioter)32

might, in this context, be interpreted as a call tocoalesce with the state regime most endowed with the juridical lati-tude and military capability to protect the urban property interest.Thus, the subsequent show of partnership between Korean Ameri-can community leaders and the LAPD (even in the face of supposedefforts to salve ‘‘Black–Korean relations’’ in Los Angeles) wasneither naıve nor undertheorized, but was instead the public mate-rialization of an emergent, ‘‘multiculturalist’’ political logic. Stra-tegic and laboriously ritualized solidarities with the state, even

and especially in its most violent and militarized extremities, become the lever through which discretely articulated ‘‘minority’’community interests stake claims to political validity and attempt




social, political, and cultural institutions. It is precisely this tacit

valorization of the state, I would argue, that constitutes and trou- bles Asian Americanist political formations and their concomitantsocial justice discourses. Feminist political philosopher WendyBrown has convincingly argued that such articulations of com-munity and identity cast ‘‘the law in particular and the state moregenerally as neutral arbiters of injury rather than as themselvesinvested with the power to injure.’’ She continues,

Thus, the effort to ‘‘outlaw’’ social injury powerfully legitimizes law andthe state as appropriate protectors against injury and casts injured indivi-duals as needing such protection by such protectors. Finally, in its economyof perpetrator and victim, this project seeks not power or emancipation forthe injured or the subordinated, but the revenge of punishment, making theperpetrator hurt as the sufferer does.33

Following the trajectory of Brown’s critique, it is worth remarkingthat it has become a matter of routine for most Asian-American Stu-dies scholars and Asian-American activists to disavow and critiquethe most bold-faced and cynical enticements toward neoconserva-

tive white–Asian political solidarity since the 1980s. Few, however,have addressed the central role of white supremacist state violence—most profoundly operationalized in the genesis of post-1970s lawand order jurisprudence and the concomitant transformation of the policing and prison apparatuses—in sustaining a de facto white-Asian partnership grounded in the entitlements of presumptivecivic freedom. Such is the inevitable solidarity that emerges fromthe dialectic of (white-Asian) decriminalization and (Black-Brown)criminalization.34 Notably, the Asian American activist communi-

ty’s confrontation with the punitive white supremacist state hasat times resorted to making normative reference of exceptionallypoor and policed Southeast Asian and Pacific Island immigrantpopulations (most often Laotians, Cambodians, Hmong, Samoans,Vietnamese, and Pilipinos) and undocumented migrant workersas evidence of an Asian=American inclusion in the sweep of thecontemporary U.S. punitive carceral formation (such references, inci-dentally, obscure the constellation of socio-political antagonisms thatcompel many within these communities to explicitly disidentify with

the ‘‘Asian American’’ panethnic=coalition rubric). These examples,which are undoubtedly crucial to addressing the localized specificityof technologies of criminalization targeting poor (Southeast) Asian

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overwhelming production of whites and Asian Americans as gener-

alized non-targets of the law and order hegemony’s juridical, cultural,and military weaponry. The implications of this condition on thevarious institutional proliferations and discursive (re)formations of Asian American Studies are profound, if largely uninterrogated.

THE CARCERAL CONDITION OF THE ASIAN-AMERICANEMERGENCE: RENARRATING THE 1965 IMMIGRATION ACT

Contemporaneous with the emergence of the U.S. prison industrial

complex since the 1970s has been the steady—if deeply conflicted—institutionalization of Asian American Studies, as well as the rapidgrowth of a veritable Asian American civil society (encompassingdiscretely self-identified Asian American nonprofit organizations,social justice campaigns, faith communities, professional networks,and cultural centers). This historical convergence—or more accu-rately, historical relationship—between the structural rearticulationof the U.S. prison as a mode of social (dis)organization and mass- based human immobilization, on the one hand, and the substantial

expansion of multiply institutionalized civil Asian Americanisms,on the other, composes a central (if generally disavowed) theoreti-cal problem for Asian American Studies. I conclude with a sche-matic reflection and incipient renarration of the difficulties andpossibilities lodged therein.

The epochal restructuring of American global capital—hall-marked by the United States’ de-linking from the gold standardin 1971—entailed rapid movements toward deindustrialization inthe domestic urban and rural spheres of the U.S. along with the

coercive translocation of manufacturing and productive appara-tuses to sites in the Third World and global South. Large-scalehuman displacement was the inevitable result of both movements,and has become the definitive feature—inscribed by the particularremappings of the World Bank=WTO’s inception and deploymentof structural adjustment programs—of globalization’s alleged liber-alizations of capital, national borders, and governmental sover-eignty. In this way, the historical genesis of the American law andorder social formation was made possible by the radical gutting—

if not wholesale evacuation—of the industrial infrastructures of urban factory production and rural agribusiness, which effectivelydivorced large numbers of Black and Brown workers from the




shapeshifting U.S. capital. These workers, who were already tenu-

ously located in the interstices between the global aspirations of cor-porate capital and the opportunism of a weak and deeply racist U.S.labor movement, were almost instantaneously recategorized inpopular and juridical discourse as economically redundant and=orsocially disposable populations. Those who were once slated forracialized hyper-exploitation under advanced industrial capitalismwere, in the imminent post-industrial law and order moment, ush-ered toward economic obsolescence, mass incarceration, and civildeath.

Running in the wake of this targeted human displacement andimmobilization was the impressive demographic growth of Asianimmigrant communities facilitated by the passage of the 1965 Immi-gration Act. A large portion of this human influx entailed thearrival of what Prashad has called the ‘‘state-selected model min-ority’’ population: the educated, upwardly mobile, property own-ing, and petit bourgeoisie. The U.S. state chose to resolve the laborneeds of an emergent service-based, corporate managerial domesticeconomy by soliciting a privileged, class-selective immigration of

professionals and well-schooled proto-professionals from placesthat had long been the targets of an effective U.S. immigration blockade.

The state, in a master stroke, thus resolved the domestic crises of globalization, most importantly the displacement of obsolete Black=Brown working populations (farm and factory workers), by actuat-ing a liberal racist cultural formation within the embryonic insti-tutional productions of a police and prison state: the UnitedStates was, in this moment, broadly engaged in a statecraft that

proclaimed an abstracted commitment to the time-honoredAmericanist valor of universal individual rights and freedoms,while erecting a policing and juridical structure that drasticallyeroded, in policy and everyday practice, the socially reproductivecapacities of the very populations that had been profiled and patho-logized by the Moynihan-Lewis intellectual bloc. In this way, theclass-selective influx of Asian immigrants (and their families)spurred by the 1965 Act, a migration that has formed the conditionof possibility for Asian Americanism as a multicultural civil project,

has also been accompanied by a massive juridical and economicre-definition of other poor and racially pathologized populationsas criminal and proto criminal populations As Manning Marable

256 D. Rodrı guez



[T]he direction of America’s political economy and social hierarchy is

veering toward a kind of subtle apocalypse which promises to obliteratethe lowest stratum of the Black and Latino poor. . . . The genocidal logicof the situation could demand, in the not too distant future, the rejectionof the ghetto’s right to survival in the new capitalist order. Without gaschambers or pogroms, the dark ghetto’s economic and social institutionsmight be destroyed, and many of its residents would simply cease to exist.35

Affirming Marable’s speculation, the prison population hasexpanded by over 1000% in the last twenty five years, with Blacks

constituting more than half the prison and jail population and‘‘Hispanics’’ amounting to at least 15% (this latter estimation is castin doubt by the state’s notoriously dubious techniques of racialcategorization and data collection). It is beyond our scope here todelve into the contested sociological and criminological rationalesfor this empirical ‘‘racial disparity’’ in imprisonment. It suffices tosay, however, that regardless of the nominal intent or juridical jus-tification for the astronomical overrepresentation of Black=Brownpopulations under state captivity, the social effect of this racially

designated structure of mass imprisonment has been fundamentalto the social and racial formation of the United States.36 This nor-malized condition of massive racial immobilization underwritesthe constitutive forces of globalization, and has crucially trans-formed targeted bodies, communities, and populations fromhyper-exploited (though still ‘‘employable’’) workers into unem-ployable surplus or excess populations—what former U.S. political pris-oner Linda Evans and Eve Goldberg have poignantly called thehuman ‘‘raw material’’ of the U.S. prison industrial complex.37

It is just as the U.S. prison has morphed into a multilayeredstructure of civic and social death that Asian Americans have galva-nized viable, even thriving renditions of multicultural Americancivic life. Such is the historical condition of possibility for these mul-tiple, civil society-based Asian Americanisms: while the very articu-lation and material gravity of Asian Americanism sits on theprecipice and precedent of the 1965 Immigration Act—an alleged‘‘liberalization’’ of a historically racist and xenophobic set of policies—we must contextualize this change in federal immigration

law as a measure that further facilitated the effective expulsion of criminalized populations from U.S. civil society. In this context, the1965 Act amounts to a selective incorporation of an Asian immi




‘‘post-civil rights’’ multicultural civil society. It also suggests a

state-proctored cultural and political validation of contemporaryAsian-American civil society over and against the durable immobi-lization, confinement, and enhanced penal segregation of otherracially pathologized populations. Finally, in the wake of the Immi-gration Act’s demographic effects, we must retheorize the vexingversatility of the Asian-American model minority ‘‘paradigm’’ assomething other than a ‘‘stereotype’’ run amuck: that is, we mustunderstand the cultural figure of the Asian-American model min-ority (both collective and embodied) as a modality of white supremacy

and racial ordering that exceeds the empirical ‘‘validity’’ of the para-digm itself.

CONCLUSION: THE PROBLEM OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES

I initiate the end of this essay with a set of questions, with the intentof 1) gesturing toward a productive disarticulation of what I per-ceive as a peculiar theoretical and political stasis within the fieldof Asian American Studies, and 2) articulating a political desire

for a critical intellectual project structured by this historically spe-cific, and ongoing, confrontation with the state of emergency thatis the prison industrial complex.

. How has the state-structured influx of Asian and Pacific Rim migrantpopulations, and the subsequent emergence of contemporary Asian-American communities, helped to further displace criminalized Blackand Brown populations and amplify what Marable calls the ‘‘subtleapocalypse’’ of mass-based civic death?

. How might the 1965 Immigration Act be re-narrated such that it is under-

stood less as an ambivalent emblem of opportunity, liberal democracy,and freedom, and more as a fundamental facet of an American movementtoward new forms of mass-based captivity and bodily immobilization,that is, as the harbinger of new forms of ‘‘unfreedom’’ as primary modesof social organization under the logic of white supremacist global capital?

. Will it be possible to muster the intellectual creativity and political will toarticulate a rupturing critique of the field’s operative structural, political,and theoretical assumptions, in order to develop a radical critique of theprison industrial complex that may fundamentally alter Asian AmericanStudies (and Ethnic Studies) as attempted practices of social transform-

ation?

Critical confrontation with the discursive material and insti

258 D. Rodrı guez



Studies and Asian American Studies is crucial to addressing this

current set of challenges. The alleged praxis of these fields hasreached a moment of stasis, even as many such departments andprograms have come under political attack and been threatenedwith varieties of planned institutional obsolescence, including theavowed absorption of Ethnic Studies into traditional disciplinaryforms and the sometimes cynical deployment of the ‘‘AmericanStudies’’ rubric as the decisive displacement of the already troubledand fractured Ethnic Studies project.

Essential to this unstable equilibrium is the relation—often dis-

avowed though impossible to avoid—between the emergence of Ethnic Studies and Asian American Studies as forms of professionalintellectual practice and the enhancement of these fields’ identifi-cation with and material investment in the increasingly reactionarycorporate university=college apparatus. The primary accountabil-ities of the ‘‘multicultural’’ professional academic class housedwithin these fields are dictated by the mandates of the corporateuniversity entity, to the extent that the very conception and insti-tutional life of Ethnic Studies and Asian American Studies has

become inseparable from the reproduction of the hegemonic Amer-ican university and college. It is in this sense that the corporate uni-versity has found allegiance with the regime of the contemporary(post–1970s) prison, evolving into a technology of power that con-ceives new forms of social disenfranchisement (e.g. the introductionof ‘‘race blind’’ admissions, prohibitive tuition hikes, and the effec-tive end of ‘‘public’’ education).

The contemporary production of the corporate university mutu-ally elaborates the emergence of the prison regime and mass based

Black=Brown imprisonment, further facilitating the liquidation of subjects whose political ontology places them beyond dominantdisciplinary and normalizing regimes, wherein they must be per-manently subsumed to the logic of the punitive. This is to say thatthere are subjects and populations that, through the material-discursive structures of the American social formation, exist as anembodied crisis, or figures of embedded and productive incoher-ence. The consistent and sometimes amplified production of non-and subhumans (discovered most profoundly in the shifting

historical categorizations of Blacks and Natives, and examined herethrough the technologies of criminalization juxtaposed with AsianAmericanism) constitute the necessary figures of negation and pro




modern and postmodern Euroamerican social formations, includ-

ing and especially the industrialized complex of the corporate uni-versity, which itself hallmarks the construction of a ‘‘post-civilrights’’ white civil society. It is here, at the pinnacle of White Recon-struction, that we must reassess and depart from our most comfort-able and venerated political-intellectual modalities.

NOTES

1. Angela Y. Davis offers a schematic definition of the prison industrial complex inColorlines: Race Culture Action, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Fall 1998): ‘‘When prisons disappearhuman beings in order to convey the illusion of solving social problems, penalinfrastructures must be created to accommodate a rapidly swelling populationof caged people. Goods and services must be provided to keep imprisoned popu-lations alive. Sometimes these populations must be kept busy and at othertimes—particularly in repressive super-maximum prisons and in INS detentioncenters—they must be deprived of virtually all meaningful activity. Vast num-

bers of handcuffed and shackled people are moved across state borders as theyare transferred from one state or federal prison to another. . . . All this work,which used to be the primary province of government, is now also performed

by private corporations, whose links to government in the field of what is euphe-mistically called ‘corrections’ resonate dangerously with the military industrialcomplex. The dividends that accrue from investment in the punishment indus-try, like those that accrue from investment in weapons production, only amountto social destruction. Taking into account the structural similarities and profita-

bility of business–government linkages in the realms of military production andpublic punishment, the expanding penal system can now be characterized as a‘prison industrial complex.’’’

2. For a full discussion of the schema of ‘‘racial formation,’’ as it is linked to aGramscian notion of social formation and hegemony, see Michael Omi andHoward Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the

1990s (2nd edn), New York: Routledge, 1994.3. While the ‘‘panethnic’’ rubric fails to account for the persistence of various polit-

ical antagonisms that necessarily fracture alleged ‘‘Asian American’’ organizingpractices (particularly along the lines of nationality, citizenship, gender, sexu-ality, and class), the term nonetheless signifies a hegemonic logic for the emerg-ence of various community organizations, grass roots campaigns, academicinitiatives, cultural=artistic productions, and entrepreneurial efforts. See Yen LeEspiritu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (1992)and Espiritu and Lopez, Panethnicity in the United States: A Theoretical Frame-work, Ethnic and Racial Studies, No. 13, (1990).

4. See generally Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the Prison-Industrial Complex

(ed. Sudbury), New York: Routledge, 2005.5. Civil death references the formal extermination of the prisoner’s civil person-

h d d li i l bj i i d h i f i i l ‘‘ i i ’’ I

260 D. Rodrı guez



available for enslavement by the state. The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S.Constitution states, ‘‘Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punish-ment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within theUnited States, or anyplace subject to their jurisdiction.’’ [emphasis added]

6. See Orlando Patterson’s seminal work on the centrality of ‘‘natal alienation’’ tothe social death of the slave, from the Roman invention of the ‘‘legal fiction’’of dominium (‘‘inner power over a thing’’) to the racial chattel slavery of theU.S. South, which linked natal alienation to a conception of Black bodily fungi-

bility. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1982). See also Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror,Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, New York: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 1997.

7. This number may be a slight underestimation, as it does not include those incar-cerated in mental health facilities, and may severely undercount the numbersincarcerated in children’s prisons, ‘‘immigrant detention’’ facilities (includingthose overseen by the U.S. government outside of its domestic auspices), militaryprisons, and other state-proctored sites of human captivity. For a basic overviewof existing data, see Bureau of Justice Statistics, ‘‘Women Offenders,’’ (12=99 NCJ175688), and ‘‘Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear 2003 (05=04 NCJ 203947);Amnesty International, ‘‘Not Part of My Sentence: Violations of the HumanRights of Women in Custody’’ (Washington, D.C.: Amnesty International,1999); Irwin, Schiraldi, and Ziedenberg, ‘‘America’s One Million NonviolentPrisoners’’ (Washington, D.C.: Justice Policy Institute, 1999), and Justice Policy

Institute, ‘‘The Punishing Decade: Prison and Jail Estimates at the Millenium’’(Washington, D.C.: Justice Policy Institute, 2000).

8. In using these categorical racial terms here, I am specifically invoking the state-sanctioned and state induced technologies of racialization that rely on the rigidsocio-political and discursive distinction between ‘‘Black’’ and non-Black racialcategories, while also referring to the troubled and contradictory terms throughwhich the state attempts to render the categorical presence of poor (non-Black)urban and rural Mexicans=Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Salvadorans,and other ‘‘Hispanics’’ and ‘‘Latinas=os.’’ As the following portion of the essayconcisely shows, the peculiarity of the United States racial formation since the1960s has involved the state’s inscription of a generalized categorization of racia-

lized ‘‘minority’’ populations that distinguishes between Asians on the one hand,and ‘‘Blacks’’=‘‘Browns’’ (specifically Mexicans and Puerto Ricans) on the other.Not coincidentally, those Pacific Islander populations that have been historicallymarginal to the construction of Asian American panethnic coalitions—Pinays=oys, Samoans, Native Hawaiians, etc.—are the same which have beenoverwhelmingly addressed by the U.S. police state as constituents within a crim-inalized Black=Brown racial continuum.

9. Barry Goldwater, 1964 Nomination Acceptance Speech, 28th RepublicanNational Convention, reprinted by The Washington Post, May 30, 1998.

10. Ibid.11. Some useful background texts include: Jael Silliman and Anannya Bhattacharjee,

Eds., Policing the National Body: Race, Gender and Criminalization in the UnitedStates, Boston: South End Press, 2002; Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: Police

d P i i th A f C i i N Y k V P 2000 Jill N l Ed




the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, New York: Holmes & Meier,1978.

12. Parenti’s Lockdown America provides a rigorously documented and extensiveoverview of this landmark period in U.S. policing, including summations of the shifts in federal budget commitments and multiple juridical overhauls thataccompanied the dramatic expansion of police forces across local, regional,and federal scales.

13. Barry Goldwater, Acceptance Speech at the 28th Republican National Convention.14. Giroux, p. 53.15. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.

Washington DC: Office of Policy Planning and Research, United States Depart-ment of Labor, 1965.

16. Oscar Lewis, La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan andNew York (1966), p. xlv. See also Lewis’s Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in theCulture of Poverty (1959) and ‘‘The Culture of Poverty,’’ Scientific American,October 1966.

17. Lewis, La Vida, p. ii.18. See Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s seminal (re)definition of ‘‘racism’’ in the essay ‘‘Race

and Globalization,’’ Geographies of Global Change: Remapping the World (2nd edn); Johnson et al., eds., 2002.

19. Notably, while the focus of Lewis’s La Vida was the ‘‘Puerto Rican family,’’ heconsidered the culture of poverty to clearly encompass ‘‘Negro family life’’ inthe United States as well.

20. Success Story of One Minority Group in U.S., U.S. News & World Report, December26, 1966, p. 73.

21. Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk (2001), p. 4–6.22. Robert S. Chang, ‘‘Toward an Asian American Legal Scholarship: Critical Race

Theory, Post-Structuralism, and Narrative Space,’’ California Law Review, No.81, p. 1264.

23. Ibid., p. 1264.24. ‘‘Behind the Power of 41 Bullets: An Interview with Ruth Wilson Gilmore,’’

Colorlines, Vol. 2, No. 4, Winter 1999–2000.25. Nicole Davis, ‘‘Schoolground or Police State?’’ Colorlines, Vol. 2, No. 4, Winter

1999–2000.

26. Henry A. Giroux, Public Spaces, Private Lives: Beyond the Culture of Cynicism,New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001, p. 54.

27. Giroux, p. 49.28. Giroux, p. 45.29. The most important book-length study of this ongoing attempt to articulate and

consolidate a white-Asian political bloc remains Dana Takagi, The Retreat fromRace: Asian-American Admissions and Racial Politics, 1992.

30. See ‘‘Los Angeles Police Scandal May Soil Hundreds of Cases,’’ The New YorkTimes, February 16, 1999.

31. Chang, ‘‘Toward an Asian American Legal Scholarship,’’ p. 1264.32. See the documentary film Sa-i-gu, Kim-Gibson and Choy, dirs. San Francisco, CA:

National Asian American Telecommunications Association, 1993. This film hasplayed a seminal role in circulating a discourse of Korean American marginaliza-ti b th t di d it l k f ‘‘ t ti ’’ f th L A l

262 D. Rodrı guez



storeowners to arm themselves in paramilitary fashion to protect their propertyfrom ‘‘rioters’’ during the 1992 uprising. Central to the film’s narrative is a gen-eralized negrophobia founded on the specter of (property) victimization at thehands of an unnamed, though unmistakably Black, unleashed and lawless urbanmob.

33. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1995, p. 27.

34. This contention derives in large part form an ongoing conversation with Prof. Jared Sexton (African American Studies, University of California, Irvine) basedon his conference presentation, ‘‘Proprieties of Coalition: Between ‘Blacks andAsians,‘’’ paper delivered at ‘‘Blacks and Asians: Encounters Through Timeand Space,’’ Boston University, April 2002.

35. Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, 1983, p. 253.36. See Marc Mauer, Race to Incarcerate, 1999. The Sentencing Project, a Washington,DC-based progressive policy think tank, has also published a useful bibliographyof key law review articles. Among the most useful to informing this portion of my argument are: Alfred Blumstein, ‘‘Racial Disproportionality of U.S. PrisonPopulations Revisited,’’ 64 University of Colorado Law Review, 1993; DavidCole, ‘‘The Paradox of Race and Crime: A Comment on Randall Kennedy’s‘Politics of Distinction,‘’’ 83 Georgetown Law Journal, 1995; Angela J. Davis,‘‘Prosecution and Race: The Power and Privilege of Discretion,’’ LXVII FordhamLaw Review, 1998; Michael Tonry, ‘‘Racial Disproportion in US Prisons,’’34 British Journal of Criminology, (1994); and The Sentencing Project, ‘‘Hispanic

Prisoners in the United States,’’ pamphlet, 2003.37. Linda Evans and Eve Goldberg write, ‘‘Like any industry, the prison economy

needs raw materials. In this case the raw materials are prisoners.’’ The Prison Industrial Complex and the Global Economy, 1998.


asian american studies in age of prison industrial complex

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